Strange Weather by Joe Hill
Perhaps it did not really understand death. Maybe it thought the balloonists were still there with it but only being very still and quiet, much like the creature inside the sphere. How much did the living cloud know, after all? How much could it know? That head inside the sphere no doubt had a brain the size of a two-car garage. But the thinking, feeling smoke . . . that was just some circuitry trapped inside a little gold dish.
“I have to get down,” he said. “I want you to put me down somewhere. Leave me on a mountaintop, and I promise never to tell anyone about any of this. You can trust me. You can look into my thoughts and see that I mean it.”
She shook her head, very sadly, very seriously.
“You don’t understand. I’m not asking. This isn’t a request. This is an offer,” he said. “Please. Put me down, and I won’t have to use this.”
And he removed the gun from his pocket.
23
SHE COCKED HER HEAD, a bit like a dog who has heard an interesting faraway sound. If she knew what the gun did—and she had to know what it did, she’d certainly been present the last time it had been used—she gave no sign. Still he felt the need to explain.
“This is a pistol. It can do a lot of damage. I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “Or your friend here. But I will if you don’t set me down safely someplace.”
She shook her head.
“I have. To. Get. Down.” He punctuated his last three words by rapping the dish with the pistol, a little harder each time. Bong, bong, bong.
The third time he struck, her body of haze seemed to ripple, like tissue paper fluttering in a gentle breeze. She retreated a step. He wasn’t sure she even could come any closer. The mist was at its thinnest here. There had barely been enough to cover the dome.
She was going to make him shoot. He hadn’t thought it would come to that. He thought it would be enough to get up here and wave the gun in the direction of whatever she’d been hiding. He wasn’t even sure a century-old bullet would fire, and if it did, he thought it was unlikely it could penetrate whatever he was sitting on. He had no doubts that the enormous pearl beneath him was from A Long Way Away and had been built to withstand worse than a slug from some nineteenth-century dandy’s peashooter.
Did she know it could fire only once, at best? No, he thought, not with any certainty but with a kind of needy desperation. No, he had to play it out, had to push it as far as it could go. He was not yet sure if he’d just fire into the air to prove the gun worked or if he dared to fire into the ball, or at the gold dish. He just knew that if this was going to work, he had to keep going, had to be willing to pull the trigger.
“Don’t make me do this,” he pleaded. “If I have to shoot, I will. Please.”
She regarded him with an expression of wild, brainless anticipation.
The gun had four slender, elegant hammers, packed tight together, one for each barrel. In his mind he rolled them all back with his thumb in a single, awesome CLACK, like the Outlaw Josey Wales getting ready to deal some rough justice in the tumbleweeds. It surprised him when he pulled at them with his thumb and they wouldn’t snap back into the ready position. Aubrey lowered the pistol and had a look at them. They were barnacled together with rusty lace, would have to be raised one at a time. He clenched his teeth and wrestled with the first. For close to a full ludicrous minute, nothing happened. He strained and strained, feeling the dramatic effect of his threat seep away by the second.
Then, all at once, it snapped back into place with a satisfying mechanical crunch, splinters of rust flying. His hand throbbed, was bruised from the effort, a deep blue indentation in the palm. He grabbed the next hammer and pulled back on it with both thumbs, wrestling at it with all the force he could muster. It was like trying to open a particularly frustrating jar of pickles. Then, as suddenly as the last time, it ratcheted back and locked into the ready-to-fire position. He exhaled, something like confidence returning, and grabbed at the third hammer with both thumbs, ready to pull against it with all his might.
Only the third hammer came free right away, flew back so unexpectedly that he let go and it fell, and the gun went off with a hot flash of light and a raggedy cough, like the backfire of a very old car.
Brimstone flared in his face, burned his nostrils. The barrels were no longer pointing at the gold cup but rather at an angle to the curved surface of that smooth gray orb. The slug cracked off the globe and clipped through one of those hair-thin gold wires. The severed gold line began to spray what looked like a billion glittery flecks of snow. A fine crack leapt through the sphere beneath, where the bullet had struck.
That continuous low thrumming sound seemed to shift, took on a reverberating note of strain.
Aubrey recoiled—from the change in sound, from the hissing spray of fine particles, from the crack in the curve of the not-glass ball. He looked at the gun, then flung it aside in horror. It was, he knew, the natural first impulse of any murderer: to get rid of the weapon. It banged off the glass, slid down the slope, and scudded out of sight in the suddenly agitated smoke.
He looked around for his Harriet of the sky. She was staggering away and melting as she went, not unlike the witch at the end of The Wizard of Oz. She sank into bubbling smoke, dissolving to her hips. Her arms were already gone, so that she looked more than ever like Greek statuary.
Aubrey turned in a circle. From here he could see the entirety of his cloud island. He looked out upon minarets and towers. They were caving in. As he watched, a tower quivered and sagged and fell into slop, a massive quaking pile of white whipped cream. Another folded at the middle, assuming the posture of a man bent over to look at his fly. Beyond the palace the rest of the cloud was in a wind-blasted torment. The surface was all chop, and the gusts caught the roiled waves and tossed smoke like sea spray.
His alarm stuck him in place. What got him moving was not the dissolving palace, the boiling cloud, or the shower of probably toxic particles hissing from the broken line. He could not find the will to move until he looked down between his feet.
Directly below, one eye opened to a slit in that grotesque, humongous face. The eyeball beneath was red, shot through with black specks, like a ball filled with blood and dead flies. It shifted dully, drowsily, this way and that, before seeming to settle: on him.
He ran. It was not a choice, not something he gave any thought. His legs were just going—Feets don’t fail me now—taking him away from the top of the pearl, away from the hideous face, away from the increasingly wasplike buzz of the golden disk.
Aubrey fled down the curve of the sphere into the churning smoke until all at once the hard, smooth surface beneath his feet was a steep ramp and his heels shot out from under him. He struck on his ass and slid almost a hundred feet before he was able to roll over and catch himself. He went another hundred feet in a series of controlled drops, grabbing cloud, hanging, letting go, grabbing the next handhold, chimpanzeeing all the way to the bottom.
Aubrey leapt off the side and fell the final fifteen feet. He expected the springy jolt of impact when his feet found bottom. Instead he was, for one dreadful moment, plunging through a cloud like any other cloud.
When he stopped, it was because the cloud seemed to thicken and press in around him, a sensation like being buried up to the waist in wet sand. He had time, when he was half buried, to take in what had become of the banquet hall. It had collapsed in on itself, a ruin in the aftermath of a direct hit from a bomb. Craggy, shattered walls rose on either side of him. The floor was a tumbled mass of pillowy boulder shapes.
He wriggled up and free and began to climb across the debris. Even then there was a feeling as if the heaps and lumps of semi-solid smoke beneath him were bobbing in the fast current of a flood. It seemed at any instant that the unsteady blocks beneath him might roll and dump him right through the billowing paleness and toward the earth below. The cloud was losing its consistency, its ability to become solid—although he did not think of it as “consistency.” The term that came
He leapt down the grand staircase, three steps at a time. The last eight stairs bubbled and foamed away before he could get to them, and he hit and stumbled and was laid out, sliding through cloud like a kid dumped off his sled at high speed and eating snow.
Then he was up and moving again, leaping over deformities scattered across the floor of the entry hall. The slagged bodies of phantom lovers reached for him with grasping claws. Heads bobbed out of the milky soup of the floor, ruined faces set in expressions of panic. He stepped on at least one face as he ran for the gate.
It did occur to him that the bridge across the moat might be gone. He slapped through the limp threads of the dissolving portcullis. It was like passing face-first into a cool, dew-damp cobweb. He was through it and running full-out when he saw that the high arch of the bridge had collapsed at the center. Not only that—it was shriveling at either end, quickly shrinking back into the sides of the moat. His heart rose in his chest like a hot-air balloon surging away from the world below. He did not think or slow down. He sped up. One step, two, out onto the last slender, decayed stub of the bridge, and he leapt.
He cleared the hole with a yard to spare, stumbled, and went down. As he picked himself up, he threw a wild glance back, just in time to see the palace drop, flattening like a magnificent pavilion caving in on itself. He flickered back to a memory of lying in bed at the age of seven, body clenched tight with pleasure, as his father snapped a sheet into the air and let it float gently down over him, like a parachute.
The parachute—those folds of silk that had once been a hot-air balloon—remained on the coatrack, although the rack itself was beginning to buckle under the weight. Beyond it the bed had lost all sense of itself and now looked like the world’s largest melted marshmallow.
Aubrey snatched up his jump harness and stepped into it, cinching it tight over his balls, pulling it on over his jumpsuit. He was just shrugging the straps over his shoulders when he heard the cry. It was a blast of noise, a cross between an air horn and a subway thundering through a tunnel. The entire cloud seemed to shudder. He thought of that huge, horrible, monstrous face and was gripped by a terrified, terrible idea: Awake! The giant is awake! Down the beanstalk!
He grabbed the pile of silks just as the coatrack went noodle-soft and collapsed. He began to run toward the edge of the cloud. As he went, he discovered he was sinking. In a moment he was up to his knees.
Aubrey found the neat bundle of ropes, and as he struggled toward the blue sky beyond the shores of the cloud, he began to clip old, rusted D-rings to the carabiners on his harness. What he was about to do amounted to little more than suicide, was a frantic act of lunacy, sure to fail. So why, he wondered, was some part of him quivering with the effort to restrain hysterical laughter?
The antique D-rings were a dozen in all. He clipped four to the front of the harness and four to the back and let the rest dangle loose. He still clutched the silk to his chest. When he looked up, he discovered his Harriet of the sky standing between him and the very edge of the cloud. She clutched the stuffed, dirty Junicorn in her arms as if it were their child, as if to block her faithless lover from leaving them both.
He lowered his head and plowed right through her. In two more steps, he was off the edge of the cloud.
Aubrey dropped like a brick.
24
HE FELL IN A STRAIGHT line, feetfirst. He hurtled eight hundred feet before he thought to let go of the bundle of silk in his arms. He had no idea how to release it and just threw it out from his body.
And he fell and fell and fell. Down he went in a wild corkscrew, dragging a long, tangled rope of silk behind.
The earth spun around and around below him: rectangles of pretty cultivated green, the humped mounds of forested hills, the flattened-squid shape of a small hamlet. He saw three white steeples, quite clearly, finely wrought spears of bone marking churches. In the distance he saw a wide horizon of filmy blue. It took him several moments to recognize it as either one of the Great Lakes or, maybe, the Atlantic Ocean.
The wind snatched his breath away from him. The very skin of his face rippled on his skull. He dropped faster and faster. Cords made loud popping sounds as they were pulled taut. The wind rattled and shook the knotted mess of silk trailing hilariously after him. How mad it had been to imagine it would catch his fall, that a balloonist of a hundred fifty years ago had left him a way off that lonely island in the sky.
Yet however worthless his half-assed antique quilt of old silk might be, he felt himself opening like a parachute—felt a steadily widening sense of joy. He let himself tip forward, spreading his arms and legs in the posture his jumpmaster had called aerobraking.
Cal. That was the guy’s name. It popped into Aubrey’s head all at once: cool Cal, the one and only. How had he forgotten?
He stopped spinning and fell toward the lush green earth below. If he weren’t sure to die from the impact, he thought he might just about die from the glory of it all. Tears streamed from his eyes, and Aubrey Griffin began to smile.
25
HE WAS AT SIX THOUSAND feet when the long rope of silk trailing him came unwound and filled. The envelope erupted with a shocking bang—billowing wide, like a waiter tossing a tablecloth into the air. Aubrey was jerked upward, actually rose almost fifty feet, leaving his stomach behind, before his descent resumed—but slower now, with a sudden feeling of calm. He felt he was floating like a dandelion seed on a soft August breeze. He was warm again: sun on his face, gently roasting him in his jumpsuit.
He tipped his head back and saw a spreading dome of red and blue silk, scattered with enormous white stars. The sun shone through the thin places, wide patches where the fabric was just threads.
The ground rose up toward him. He saw a yellowing pasture almost directly below, pine trees at the back of it. To the east the field was bordered by a black strip of two-lane highway. Aubrey watched a red pickup glide along it, a black-and-white collie in the flatbed. The dog saw him and barked, his yaps flat and small and coming from a long way off. A farmhouse stood to the north, a dusty yard out back, a decrepit-looking barn nearby. Aubrey shut his eyes, smelling golden pollen, dry earth, hot tar.
When he opened his eyes, the meadow was rushing up at him. It occurred to him that landing might not be as peaceful as the slow fall to earth. Then he hit, heels first, a hard slam of impact that went up into his tailbone with a painful shock.
He found himself running through coarse yellow grass. Butterflies scattered before him in a bright panic. The raggedy parachute above wasn’t done with him yet. It yanked him back up, dropped him, pulled him into the air again, yo-yoing him across the field. It made booming sounds each time it caught another scoop of ground wind and filled tight. Not only was Aubrey running—he couldn’t stop. If he quit, the parachute would drag him. Aubrey began to unclip carabiners, wrestling with hard, cable-tight ropes.
He saw the road ahead, and a fence, rotten wood posts with three widely spaced lines of rusting barbed wire strung through them. The parachute inflated yet again, hauling him into the air. He lifted his knees almost to his chest and was carried right over the lines.
Aubrey put his feet down in a ditch on the other side, stumbled, and was remorselessly dragged out into the highway. He reached around behind him, grasping wildly for the carabiners on the back of his harness. He unclasped one, a second. The road burned his knees through his jumpsuit. He leapt up, did a hopping jig, found a third clip, snapped it free. He twisted from the waist, feeling for the last. It sprang loose all of a sudden, and Aubrey was thrown onto his chest, across the dotted yellow line.
He lifted his head and watched as the gay ruin of his parachute was sucked into the crown of an enormous oak across the street. Immediately it collapsed, draping itself upon the branches.
Aubrey turned over. He ached in the small of his back, in his knees. His throat was sandpaper dry. He gazed into the bright, hard
He felt an inexplicable throb of affection for it—for the home his Sky Harriet had tried to make for him there. He felt in some ways that he was still gently floating to earth. He might be floating like this for days.
He was yet on his back in the road when a guy in a black Cadillac rolled down the highway from the north, slowing as he approached, then steering a wide berth around Aubrey. The Caddy stopped right next to him.
The driver—an old man with angry blue eyes under a thicket of storm-cloud-colored eyebrows—powered down his window. “Fuck you doin’ in the road? Someone could go right over you, asshole!”
Aubrey, unoffended, sat up on his elbows. “Hey, mister. Where is this? Am I in Pennsylvania?”
The driver glared, his lean face darkening, as if Aubrey were the one who had called him an asshole. “What kinda drugs you on? I oughta call the cops!”
“So not Pennsylvania?”
“Try New Hampshire!”
“Huh. No kidding.” Aubrey wasn’t sure he could get out of the road just yet. It was awfully nice here, warm blacktop beneath his back, sun glowing on his face. He was in no rush to get to whatever was next.
“Jesus!” the old bird said, spittle flying from his lips. “Get your head out of the clouds!”
“Just did,” Aubrey said.
The old guy powered his window back up and got out of there. Aubrey turned his head to watch him go.
When he had the highway to himself, he got to his feet, dusted off his rear, and began to walk. From above he had seen a farmhouse not too far away. If anyone was home, he thought he’d ask to use their phone. He figured his mother might like to know he was alive.